FOLLOWING THE MELTDOWN of the global economy in 2008-9, it was
almost inevitable that the capitalist elite who had engineered the
crisis would place not merely the burden of paying but the ideological
blame for the crisis on its victims.

Not all has gone their way, however. Capitalism has, for example,
come under concerted attack from varied and sundry sources as has not
happened in almost a century. Thus, whether they arise from concerns for
economic justice or ecological survival, from an interest in
"radical democracy" or in anti-imperialism, critiques of
capitalism are back on the menu. Good stuff.

Still, many of these critiques, well-meaning and intentioned though
they be, suffer--not invariably, you understand, but often enough to
warrant deep concern--from a certain, how to say, befuddlement. One need
only witness, for instance, the plethora of qualifiers on the subject to
get a sense of the affliction: "corporate capitalism,"
"disaster capitalism," "extreme capitalism,"
"financial capitalism," "free market capitalism,"
"rentier capitalism," "monopoly capitalism,"
"classical capitalism," "unfettered capitalism,"
etc.

Now, in casting our analytical gaze upon these adjectival
qualifiers I submit that we are engaging in something rather more than a
mere grammatical cavil. It may be true that some of the authors
routinely employing these terms understand that what they are doing is
simply bringing into bold relief a particular structural or historical
aspect of capitalism. All well and good. But there is evidence to
suggest that, much of the time, this is exactly not what is going on;
that in fact what is going on is a barely veiled ideological
"reformism."

The latter term refers to the notion that capitalism is not in its
essence bad, just that some variants of it are. Thus, if only we could,
say, get back to "classical capitalism" (a mythical time when
capitalists supposedly understood what a "free market" really
was) then all would be well. Or perhaps, if we could just rid ourselves
of "financial capitalism," then we could all get back to a
regulated, productive, and equitable capitalism.The Golden Age would
then, as capitalist ideologues themselves constantly assure us, be just
around the next corner.

But, of course, no, it wouldn't.

For where all these qualifying formulations miss the mark is in
either forgetting, or in failing utterly to grasp, of what the core of
capitalism really consists.

And so, then, of what does it consist?

Without diving too deeply into the inky abyss of Das Kapital we may
yet say that capitalism is founded, first and foremost, on exploitation
and that this exploitation is fundamental. Which is to say that it is
not merely a matter of a temporary systemic "crisis"
demanding--all odes to the immanent Golden Age aside--forty-year global
"austerity programs," but that the wringing of capitalist
profits is situated precisely in the theft of workers' labour, of
their "surplus value." Moreover, this theft, structured on the
profit motive, is further enjoined and aggravated by competitive
inter-capitalist rivalry leading to the ineluctable "tendency of
the rate of profit to fall."

Consequent upon the latter are protracted periods of open class
warfare in the global capitalist centres, and economic (and military)
imperialism targeting the capitalist periphery. Indeed, far from
standing on its own two legs, capitalism has always depended upon
"primitive accumulation," i.e. on non-capitalist inputs such
as stolen resources, slave labour and subjugated markets, for its
survival. (Indeed, David Harvey updates the concept in what he calls
"accumulation by dispossession.") As Rosa Luxemburg noted,
colonialism, far from being some mere historical starting point, is
capitalism's constant and necessary condition.

Second, we may say that capitalism, whatever we may grant to it as
an "engine of wealth creation," is an essentially irrational
economic system geared not towards the maximization of material wealth
in general (as is often implied), but merely towards the maximization of
wealth in so far as it can be appropriated as private profit. Thus, the
"crises of overproduction" which so regularly afflict the
system overproduce goods not from the perspective of need (to which the
billions of impoverished and immiserated humans on this planet bear
stark witness), nor even from the perspective of the technical means and
limits available to production, but only from the perspective of the
money-backed profit that can be extracted from them.

Third, at the heart of capitalism is the centralization and
concentration of both wealth and power. In this sense capitalism is akin
to an unstable dynamic system in physics, rather like a bicycle in
motion. It either moves (expands), or fails. The capture of political
power is then but a simple corollary of the concentration of wealth.
Whence the myth of bourgeois liberalism that you can somehow have
political democracy without economic democracy. And whence also the myth
of "reforming" capitalism, an aspiration that founders on the
rocks of capitalism's revolutionary and expansionary dynamic, a
dynamic that renders all such "reform" both ephemeral and,
ultimately, illusory.

And finally, this continual expansion, just by the by, also
presumes global ecocide, a conclusion the "mature" Marx
presciently realized was the only "inevitable" demise of the
capitalist system. And the only thing standing in the way of that grim
future, as he also realized, was/is the development of a class
consciousness sufficient for capitalism's replacement--not its
reform--by a truly democratic, rationally planned political economy.

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